TAUGHT BY

Perhaps you'd like a job in user experience. Or maybe you already work in the field but you’ve never had any formal training. Or maybe you want to improve your skills in one specific area, like usability testing or expert reviews. I’ve turned thousands of people into user experience designers and researchers and now you can join their ranks by taking my courses on Udemy.

You’re probably curious about my background. At 18, I appeared as an extra in the film “Quadrophenia” alongside Sting. Despite a critically-acclaimed performance lasting 5 seconds, follow-up offers from Hollywood failed to arrive so I turned to psychology where I gained a BSc and a PhD. Since 1989 I've worked in the fields of human factors, usability and user experience and I've published two books on usability. I'm now the Managing Director of Userfocus, a consultancy specialising in user experience. I'm also an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Chartered Psychologist and a member of the User Experience Professionals Association. I’m no longer in contact with Sting, whose career trajectory has been somewhat different.

I've provided usability support to top brands like HP, Microsoft, Whirlpool, Orange, Skype, eBay and Yahoo! and I've also consulted with public sector organisations like The Greater London Authority, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, UK Government and theWorld Health Organization.

My students describe me as passionate and technically knowledgeable and students voted me a Udemy "Outstanding Instructor" in 2014.

I'm @userfocus on Twitter and I publish regular articles on user experience at the Userfocus web site.

WHAT'S INSIDE

Lifetime access to 61 lectures and 4 quizzes

10+ hours of high quality content

A community of 4100+ students learning together!

380+ discussions

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User Experience: The Ultimate Guide to Usability

Get a job in UX and improve your web site's UI design with this in-depth, hands-on user experience training course.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Thousands of UX designers have successfully completed this course, and as a result are out there creating great user experiences every day. You can do it, too.

UX Mastery reviewed dozens of online courses in UX, but they gave just one course 10/10: this one.

Student engagement is a key objective on this course -- and that's why this course has more student reviews and more student discussions than any other UX course on Udemy.

Not only will you discover the steps needed to design easy-to-use web sites, you’ll also get the chance to try them out on a design problem you’re working on right now.

As we go through the course, you’ll download worksheets, try out sample exercises, take quizzes and view demonstrations of UX methods that you can then apply to your design problem. Since we cover the full design lifecycle, this means that at the end of the course you’ll:

Understand your users and their goals.

Design great looking pages.

Create sites that are easy to navigate.

Prototype your web site.

Usability test your design.

Thousands of delegates throughout the world have attended the classroom-based version of this course, but this is the first time it’s been available online. And this isn’t just a video of the course lectures. All of the content has been re-written for online delivery and the video lectures have been specially shot for the Udemy platform.

- All of the video lectures, eBooks and worksheets are download-enabled. If you have a slow internet connection, or want to take this course with you on your laptop, smartphone or other portable device, sign up and download all the videos and other course materials now.

- Every lecture has been fully transcribed as a Microsoft Word document. This is useful if English isn’t your native language or if you just want a readable and searchable version of the course.

- During the course, you can network with fellow students, ask questions and submit assignments for peer review in our thriving Facebook group.

- On completion of the training, you will receive a certificate of completion and be eligible for free, e-mail-based, follow-up training.

Is it for you? Read on to find out…

Are you looking for a job in UX? According to a recent report, "UX designer" and "UI designer" are two of the ten fastest growing job titles in the last 5 years — and this course will help you get a job in the field. Want proof? After taking this course, George Atherton went for a job interview with Microsoft’s UX team. He wrote to say that “the course gave me enough background to speak with confidence during the interview about the UX design process, and being able to say that I’d completed a UX certification course gave me some mileage despite having little prior experience.” The great news is that he landed the job. So if your goal is to get a job in UX, take this course first.

Are you developing a web site and need to create a great user experience? After taking this course, Tyler Dylan Brown wrote, “This brought my entire Agile development team up to speed on how to integrate customer development/feedback into a user centered design process. MUST HAVE for engineers.”

Are you looking for tips and tricks to design better user interfaces? After taking this course, Clasesdeguitarra wrote: "Of all the courses I´ve taken here, yours was the one that really got things going for me. I managed to get the bounce rate of my web site from 75% to 30% just by following some simple things I learned from you."

Are you a web designer or developer looking to expand your skill set to include user experience? After taking this course, Alan Hurt wrote, “I took this course as a web application developer looking to learn some UX basics in an effort to bring in more User Experience design aspects to my work environment, and I have to say the course exceeded my expectations with what I learned. Each lesson teaches you something useful and the exercises actually make you think about what you are learning.”

Are you looking to pass HFI’s CUA exam? After taking this course, Anne Adrian Hondema wrote, "This morning I took HFI's CUA-exam and I am glad to inform you that I passed! Your courses on Udemy have proven to be a good alternative for the (much more expensive) courses of HFI and I thank you for that. Okay, I did a lot of reading apart from your courses, but the general 'red route' through usability-land was very useful and provided the 'hooks' I needed to do further exploration."

Are you looking to broaden your knowledge of UX or put what you know on a more formal footing? After taking this course, Matthew Magain wrote, “The depth and breadth of content covered in this course is seriously impressive. All of the major UX techniques are covered in a way that anyone could take this advice and apply it to their own projects or organisation. If you want to learn how to do user-centred design, this is the course to get.”

Sign up now to get lifetime access to this course. With Udemy's 30-day money-back guarantee, it's risk-free.

CURRICULUM

Introduction

In this session, we get introduced and review the course objectives. We then briefly review the main business benefit of a focus on user experience. From this page you can also download all of the slides that I show on the course ("Slides Complete").

In this lecture, we review 3 key principles of user experience and we explore the international usability standard, ISO 9241.

4

The Fable of the User Centred Designer

42 pages

Follow a young man's journey as he discovers the three secrets of user-centred design.

SECTION 2:

Going where the action is: Understanding users in context

5

How usability depends on the “context of use”

10:24

This lecture explains why context is so crucial to designing a good user experience. We also review why, if you're a member of a design team, you are not representative of the target audience.

6

What is a browser?

02:33

If we asked 50 people this question: “What is a browser?”, how many people do you think would give us a correct answer? Does this video challenge your views of how "ordinary" people think about technology?

7

An introduction to contextual inquiry

10:45

There are many ways of getting an understanding of your users' context. Here we cover one of the more useful techniques: contextual inquiry. This technique lets you penetrate deep into the world of your users and discover what it is that they actually want to do with your site.

8

Ozzie's Remote (NSFW)

01:58

Imagine you work for a company developing a new user interface for a home entertainment system.

You’re going to visit a customer to see how the existing system is used.

After you’ve watched the video, list 10 things you learnt from observing Ozzie in context.

Note: The video includes bad language -- best not to play it loudly in your office.

Use this worksheet to remind you what to pay attention to during a site visit.

11

Contextual Interview Summary worksheet

1 page

A handy form to summarise your observations during a contextual inquiry.

12

Interview Highlights worksheet

1 page

A handy form to summarise your observations during a user interview.

13

Flash quiz

5 questions

14

Answers to the Flash Quiz

03:32

Here's my explanation for the answers to the quiz.

SECTION 3:

How to get niche quick

15

Introduction to Personas

18:53

Does your web site suffer from 'elastic user' syndrome, where you give equal value to every possible user doing every possible task? In this lecture, we explain why “Something for Everybody” means “Everything for Nobody”.

16

Walkthrough of a persona case study

11:44

Let's look at a case study where we are designing a mobile app aimed at walkers (hikers). How would we go about developing personas for this application?

17

Data analysis techniques for classifying users

18:16

In this lecture, we review a more complex persona case study where the different behaviours are multi-dimensional. We also cover a number of ways of publicising your personas.

Use this form to help you think about the main groups of user for your web site.

19

Individual persona worksheet

1 page

Use this form to create a persona for your web site.

SECTION 4:

What can a London bus teach us about usability?

20

Red Routes, or why featuritis doesn't work

12:05

A common design mistake is to assume the design should always be made as flexible as possible. Flexibility has costs in terms of decreased efficiency, added complexity, increased time, and money for development. A focus on users tasks can help us enormously.

In this lecture, we review the benefits of a focus on red routes and then carry out a number of activities to identify red routes for different web sites.

22

Red Routes — Quick Activity

1 page

Use this form for the red routes activity.

23

How to build bulletproof user stories for agile

11:20

People approach red routes differently based on the context of use. So we need to embed some of the user's context into the red route. We do this by creating user stories.

24

Red Routes and User Stories worksheet

1 page

Use this form to create red routes and user stories for your own web site.

SECTION 5:

Beyond “easy to use”: Measuring the user experience

25

Lean UX and hypothesis testing

07:57

How does your company measure the success of its products and services? Are product teams judged on how easy their products are to use or on how fast the products are completed? You might not think that user experience can be measured, but it can. Here's how.

The ISO definition of usability gives us three measures that we can use to assess the usability of our web site. In this lecture we show how to unpack the definition of usability and apply it to usability measurement.

Site structure and navigation: Finding is the new doing

In this lecture, we introduce the topic of Information Architecture (IA) and show that it is about SMOLF-ing information: structuring, managing, organising, labeling and finding information.

30

Organising content with the LATCH model

08:27

Richard Saul Wurman wrote a book called “Information Anxiety”. In it, he introduced the idea of the 5 hatracks: the 5 ways that you can organise any kind of information: location, alphabet, time, category or hierarchy. Let's look at how to use each of these organisational schemes.

31

Information Architecture — Quick Activity

1 page

Use this form for the LATCH exercise.

32

How to use online and offline card sorts

14:08

The hardest kind of information to organise is category information as you don’t know the categories that people use. In this case, card sorting is the technique to use. In this lecture, we describe how to run a card sort.

Note: these links were only added in July 2013 so it will be a while before there is a lot of data to compare.

34

Take part in a card sort

Text

35

Analysing card sort data

10:45

You analyse card sort data with agglomerative monothetic clustering. It sounds complicated, but conceptually it's quite straightforward. In this lecture, we describe this analysis method.

36

Mental models and skeuomorphic design

15:35

If you understand your users’ mental models, you'll find it much easier to organise and structure information in a way that makes sense to them. But what do we mean by "mental models" and how can using metaphors in our design help and hinder?

People have certain expectations about where certain user interface elements (like search) should appear on screen. In this lecture, we review those expectations and show how you can use them to your advantage.

41

Progressive disclosure

04:35

Progressive disclosure is a fundamental principle of interaction design that allows you to simplify your user interface. It exploits a basic law of psychology known as Hick’s Law, but I like to think of it as a reverse strip tease. Here's why.

Visual design is often dismissed as eye candy. In fact, we can use four key principles of visual design to create more usable interfaces. These principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity.

Have you ever wondered what goes into a paper prototyping pack? Would you like to put your own pack together? This lecture shows you how to use the contents of your stationery cupboard to create paper interfaces.

49

User interface sketching templates for web

2 pages

You may find these templates useful when drawing out your own user interface designs.

50

Paper prototyping helper kit

4 pages

When you're creating a paper prototype, it saves time to have controls and buttons that you can cut out and re-use, without needing to draw your own. Here's a set that you can download and use. For best results, print on 6” x 4” card, use repositionable glue and don't run with scissors.

SECTION 8:

“And I have the data to prove it”: How to assess a web site

51

The 2 types of usability evaluation

04:01

There are just two ways of evaluating user interfaces. Every evaluation technique falls into one or other of these categories.

52

10 heuristics of user interface design (Pt 1)

15:32

In collaboration with Rolf Molich, Jakob Nielsen created 10 principles or "heuristics" you can use to evaluate your interface. Here we review the first five heuristics.

- And for a longer list of similar tools, see: http://remoteresear.ch/tools/

64

Q&A, February 2014

37:50

Questions covered on this Q&A

Careers in UX

Tomi

I am studying human computer interaction, interface design and usability. I don't have experience in computer field as I am changing profession. I am very passionate about what I study and I use all my free time to study among with school and work. How can I approach an employer and convince them with my CV without having experience?

Patrick

Having completed your course and some other study I feel ready to dive into UX and User Testing work, so what's the next step? The usual problem arises I get a job with out experience, can't get experience without a job. Any suggestions on who to approach this.

Martin

Is the HFI-CUA exam worth it, meaning is it credible enough to consider paying for? Are there alternatives to this certificate? Credibility as a UX professional - how do I best boost it?

Process

Jan

I'm in a small company, and we are a very small UX team (2 people) with limited capacity. Sometimes I feel like we are working on the wrong things — like discussions with developers, where we have to fight for our solutions because developers say the ideas are too complex to implement. At the same time, we are not always 100% sure if our solution is the best solution because we can only roughly test our solution in advance, due to budget and timeline. If for any reason our solution needs to be changed afterwards, the discussions with development sometimes get nasty because we're proven wrong. I'm always saying that usability design is an agile discipline, too. Just like our development is agile (SCRUM). But I feel like I'm talking to a wall. Developers tend to protect their area from outside influence like UX designers.

So here are some questions to that:

How can we (UX team) manage to get more time & budget from our project lead, to get more solid solutions (more time for creative process, more time for testing)? What are your best arguments to convince our bosses

What is your best practice approach for a UX design team in a SCRUM development environment?

Daniel

Which of your methods apply best to designers who have to work within the confines of existing software templates and standards of a large enterprise system? The company I work for has software that is so vast that radical design changes are difficult.

Jan

I'm in a small software company with a small UX team (2 people). I'm also member of an innovation project team where we are exploring new ideas and new concepts all around our business sector. The team has members from different disciplines like sales, development, support, marketing, product management, UX & Design, board members, etc. My part in the team is the UX discipline. I'd like to do a quick briefing from time to time where I introduce the core principles of UX to all team members. What would be your key topics or most valuable lessons on UX to an innovation project team?

Andreas

The line that define UX and strategy in the online world is getting blurred leaving the two professional roles collaborate close to each other in different projects. How a UX designer can close the gap and learn more about strategy to be recognise as trustable figure in the business?

How do I…?

Ryan

Could you explain how to go from a group of tasks to creating a task flow through task analysis? I have trouble understanding and isolating the user objects and actions, etc.

David

How do you elicit user goals during interviews / contextual inquiries? Are there specific types of questions we can ask, or are they inferred from understanding their tasks?

Jorge

I'd like to know a bit more about how to prepare Card Sorting with the client/boss, a few project owners are interested in helping with it however they don't understand how it works. So, should we do a test run while creating tasks/cards or just "play" with the ones I prepare?

PS: I think it's not on the scope of the course but I'd like to know more about how to charge/assess quotes.

Anastasiia

What do you think about Social Product Development as a new way working with users? How should we change the workflow for making user research?

Tytus

It would be useful to get more information about IA, card sorting, red routes and UX & Agile:

How many cards should testers receive?

What should be written on the cards?

What is the min/max amount of elements in group?

What is next in IA - how to create navigation systems, labelling systems, organising systems and search systems? Card sort will help with some, but not all; your answer to my comment in lecture 33 provides useful information, maybe include it in an updated lecture?

How to get from user journeys through user flows to red routes?

How to implement UX stuff into Agile/Scrum? I know it is not the purpose of this course, but some students may find it useful.

65

Q&A, August 2014

46:59

In this Q&A I answer the following questions.

DrFola

What happens when a business’s goals are not in alignment with users' needs? For example, what if your field research with users suggests you should work on something different to what the business is asking for.

Tommy Nguyen Duc

1. In Asian countries (like Vietnam and China), there are many IT outsourcing companies that deal with software development and testing. But the users of these systems are often based abroad. How can UXers work effectively in an Asian-based product team when their users are in another country (US, EU)?

2. How do you make UX profitable? How should you sell UX?

Josephine Caffrey

Good, Fast, Cheap - pick any two? What CANNOT be compromised if something has to give?

(On a separate note, I noticed a lot of typos in the video closed captioning. I rely on it because of office noises, accents, audio quality etc. )

Helen Brown

After taking yours and others' classes on user experience and usability, I feel still quite unsure (in practice) whether I am asking the right questions when forming the tasks for the users to perform. For example, I just performed a usability test on the navigational experience (i.e. finding the particular courses they were interested in) for an online educational website (similar to Lynda.com, but focused on a particular industry). While the tasks were good and we found out a lot of user pain points and even things we didn't know we didn't know...still, I can think of so many other tasks I could have asked for. I want to know how you prioritize your usability test tasks: how do you decide which tasks to ask users to carry out?

Allison Farquhar

What's your take on the future of the lone "UX Researcher"? Seems like I'm seeing more and more "UX Designer" jobs out there that require the research but they also seem to need significant design & programming skills.

Liz

What are the UX design differences when designing a website that aims to make money versus other types of web site, such as crowdsourcing sites, and social entrepreneurship?

How do you use to get people to participate in UX activities and give you personal information ?

Aditi Pany

We are setting up a new e-commerce venture with fairly ambitious goals, backed by a large company. What I'm trying to understand is where should the User Experience Designer / Officer sit in the organization structure?

What is the best practice? What are the trends?

Is this treated as a separate function where the team reports to the CEO or is this treated as a subset of Product Management reporting to the Product Management Head? Where is the industry trending? Does it depend on stage of the business.

What, if resources are NOT a constraint and we are not bootstrapping, but simply want to build an outstanding product for our users?

Lorena Leticia Garcia Arrache

1.- How should the UX/Designer/researcher role fit on tech projects?

2.- How should the software development process/workflow look? What are the UX/Designer responsibilities on software development projects?

3.- What areas of knowledge do you think I should look at or study to enrich myself (my professional background is in Graphic Design). Are there any specialized courses or seminars you could recommend about specific techniques, theories, methodologies, etc? Are there specialized publications to find out about the UX Design state of the art?

4.- As a UX Designer should I stop doing graphic design activities (implementing graphics and UI elements)? As a graphic designer I have been focused on creating visual elements but I really want to become a UX Designer.

5.- What is the difference between a UX Designer, a UI Designer and an interaction designer?

6.- Are there institutions doing formal research on UX Design?

7.- Is there a kind of UX Designer international certification?

8.- Can you provide a list of some companies successfully selling “UX Design" to other companies, organizations or individuals?

9.- How important is the UX Designer role for software companies? Is there a study about this? Are there many software companies that consider the UX Designer role?

10.- How can I "sell" the idea or importance of UX Design to my boss, my customer, the stakeholders?? How can I encourage investment in UX Design?

UDEMY BY THE NUMBERS

RATING

User Experience: The Ultimate Guide to Usability

202

39

5

1

0

AVERAGE RATING

NUMBER OF RATINGS

247

REVIEWS

Nikita Bharwada

6 days ago

The Best course for beginners interested in User Experience

Overall this course was a great experience in getting to know about User Experience. This is a must course as a beginner to get a good grip of the fundamentals and the basics of User Experience. The best part is the quiz after each section, which really helped me to know how much I have actually learned. This course is very much detailed with really good examples. Thanks.

Emilio Pelaez

8 days ago

a very Good Product

The missing starts is just because it should be a little outdated, nevertheless the information learned is still applicable.

Amit Tripuraneni

a month ago

Genius lies in simplicity

Dr. David Travis does an amazing job simplifying and explaining the bigger picture stuff about User Experience in a very easy to follow manner. Each of the sub-components are explained in detail and the assignments are followed up with appropriate feedback - making the course interactive and keeping you on the task.The lectures are user friendly and the production quality and examples are very good.
I started the course unsure about how much I'd learn but I've not only finished the course but also really enjoyed doing it. With a broader perspective, it's encouraged me to seek out more books and courses to go more in-depth into Mobile UX - which I'm very interested in.
I'd highly recommend this course to anyone seeking to understand User Experience.

Healey

a month ago

Very personable

Dr. Travis is very personable and gives multiple examples of every concept throughout the course. He also provided you with worksheets so you can try out what you just learned. There is no pressure to pass the quizzes and it is all focused on the learning. I have written him questions by email and he has written me back. I couldn't ask for a better instructor to teach me UX. On a side note, it is nice that you get a certificate when you complete the course, it feels like a true accomplishment. I highly recommend this course.

Christina Zoellmann

3 months ago

Great course and feels very interactive

I’m very happy to have found this course. Dr. Travis is a great teacher and even it's just an online training it feels like a 1:1 personal training. I wanted to get a better overview on UX which this course definelty did. Dr. Travis also offers great download material and gives a lot of online ressources for tools you can use for your work. Altogether it’s a really good training, whether you are new to UX or you want to resfresh your knowledge. Absolutely worth the money. Thank you!